COVID IS OVER: Norway lifts final COVID curbs on social distancing.
Archive for 2022
February 13, 2022
DEVELOPING: Clinton campaign paid to ‘infiltrate’ Trump Tower, White House servers to link Trump to Russia: Durham.
UPDATE: Jake Sullivan’s Wife Faces Growing Calls for Recusal From Durham Probe.
(Updated and bumped.)
GEORGE LEEF: Here’s a Bill All States Should Enact Right Away.
The nasty business of requiring applicants for teaching positions to submit “diversity statements” is sweeping the country. The purpose of such statements is to help leftist decision makers cull out applicants who aren’t sufficiently enthused about the whole social-justice/diversity agenda.
State legislatures can and should put a stop to this. Toward that end, the James G. Martin Center and the Goldwater Institute have collaborated with Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center to draft a model bill, the End Political Litmus Tests in Education Act.
Eager to preserve its control over academic hiring, the Left will no doubt scream that this would be an interference with “academic freedom.” But it’s nothing of the kind. To insist that government-funded schools abjure ideological tests and only seek to hire the most competent individuals is perfectly unobjectionable.
More on the bill, including the full text, here. Send a copy to your legislators!
DEAL OF THE DAY: Emergency Survival Kit and First Aid Kit, 142Pcs Professional Survival Gear and Equipment. #CommissionEarned
UNEXPECTEDLY! The deadly consequences of Defund the Police.
Remember ‘Defund the Police’? It was the slogan du jour of the Black Lives Matter movement. It was being hollered on every street during the protests over the killing of George Floyd by Minnesota cop Derek Chauvin. In those riotous days in the summer of 2020, everyone seemed to be waving a placard or wearing a t-shirt demanding defunding. The entire in-crowd posted those three words on their social-media accounts. Even here in the UK, where cops aren’t armed and where the police-funding model is very different to America’s, the right-on lined up behind the vague, strange call for police forces to be starved of funds. A headline in the impeccably middle-class Guardian declared: ‘The answer to police violence is not “reform”. It’s defunding.’
Yet now, ‘Defund the Police’ seems to be a fast fading idea. You don’t hear it very much anymore. It might linger among the white antifa oafs who stomp around in cities like Portland and among well-to-do radical students on quiet, handsome campuses in the UK where there’s very rarely any need to call the cops. But on the streets, in politics, in the press, ‘Defund’ seems to have fizzled out. The old woke roar is barely a whimper now. And it isn’t hard to see why. This slogan has proven lethal. It has been an unmitigated disaster in numerous US cities. The cutting of cops’ budgets did not give rise to the new dawn of flowery peace and racial justice that the virtue-signalling defunders fantasised it would. On the contrary, it helped to stoke violent crime, further destabilise city life, and make life even harder for poor black and brown communities in particular. The lesson here is clear: wokeness kills.
The idea of ‘Defund the Police’ has been around for a couple of decades. But it exploded into public view following the killing of Floyd in May 2020. It’s a simple-sounding proposition: you take public money away from police departments that are too often heavy-handed and racially prejudiced and plough it instead into fairer non-policing forms of ‘public safety’, like mental healthcare, youth services, improvements to housing, and so on. And hey presto, there’ll be fewer trigger-happy cops on the streets and more happy citizens no longer tussling with mental problems and crappy living conditions. The reality, of course, as could have been predicted by anyone who doesn’t live in a gated community and get all their news from the New York Times, has been rather different.
Who knew that creating massive no-go zones for the police would end quite badly?
WAIT, DON’T PEOPLE USE THESE BECAUSE THEY’RE SUPPOSED TO BE SAFER THAN SINGLE-USE BOTTLES? Reusable plastic bottles shown to release hundreds of chemicals. “Professor Christensen and fellow researcher Selina Tisler detected more than 400 different substances from the bottle plastic and over 3,500 substances derived from dishwasher soap. A large portion of these are unknown substances that the researchers have yet to identify. But even of the identified chemicals, the toxicity of at least 70 % remains unknown.”
No word of quantities, and that’s the rub with this research: “She emphasizes that they have yet to conclude whether the water in the bottles is harmful to health, as they currently have only an estimate of the concentrations of the substances and toxicological assessments have yet to be completed.”
THAT’S NOT EGG: “The dust on the Chris Cuomo-Jeff Zucker imbroglio is far from settled, I am told by people involved in the matter. Chris wants his money and Zucker also knows stuff about Chris, if and when push comes to shove. If you like your media-business laundry dirty, get your popcorn ready; some of the biggest players in Big Media could have plenty of egg on their faces as this one plays out.”
OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH COVID-19: Democrats Will Pivot to a ‘Return to Normalcy’ in Biden’s State of the Union Speech.
Democrats, panicking over their crumbling chances to maintain control of the House or Senate after the midterm elections in November, are casting about desperately for a way to alter the dynamic of the campaign and give themselves hope for a miracle.
he most recent generic congressional poll has Republicans up by six points — a number that would turn the midterms into a slaughterhouse for Democrats. And with Biden’s favorability equally underwater, Democrats know they have to do something in a hurry if they’re going to turn in a respectable midterm showing, much less maintain control of Congress.
With the State of the Union speech coming up on March 1, a growing number of Democrats are pointing to that date to begin the turnaround. They are urging President Biden to consider the bold move of lifting all mandates and restrictions that are within his power to do so.
“Not since the collapse of the Hindenburg Line in 1918 have such bitterly held positions been abandoned so quickly,” as the BattleSwarm blog noted recently.
ROGER KIMBALL: Oligarchy’s Response to the Freedom Convoy Bodes Ill for Them.
According to the media, the Canadian truckers, and their imitators around the globe, are protesting COVID vaccine mandates. That’s only part of their complaint. They don’t like the government ordering them to inject substances into their bodies that have not been shown to be safe (or effective), made by drug companies that are protected from liability for years.
But the standoff is more basic. It is like the standoff between the American colonists and the British authorities in the late 1760s and early 1770s. That standoff turned on the question “Who rules?” So, ultimately, does the conflict between the established regimes and the truckers and other protestors. Legitimacy does not proceed from the barrel of a gun, although Western “democracies” everywhere seem to have ignored the lessons of history. Consider this scene from Paris, where the police just savagely beat a protestor. Juliette Kayyem, a CNN contributor, Harvard professor (of course it would be Harvard) and Obama’s former assistant secretary of homeland security for intergovernmental affairs, suggested on Twitter that Canadian police should “slash the tires, empty gas tanks, arrest the drivers” of the protesting truckers. (As one internet wit observed, it would be amusing to watch what would happen should she manage to slash a 100-psi steel-belted tire on an 18-wheel rig.)
There are several ironies regarding the Canadian chapter of this uprising against the self-appointed elites who wish to rule us. For one thing, although Canadian officialdom is bemoaning the fact that the truckers had, in effect, closed the U.S.-Canada border, Trudeau had essentially sealed the border between the two countries for more than a year. The Babylon Bee captured this side of the situation brilliantly with a story headlined “Trudeau Demands Protesters Stop Shutting Down City So That He Can Shut Down City.”
Read the whole thing.
READING THE POLLS AND PROTECTING DEMOCRATIC GOVERNORS: News media flipflops on masks.
Related: Polling gets Democrats to finally begin their COVID retreat.
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A MUCH BIGGER BLOG: Why the Olympics Suck So Hard. New video from Reason TV:
‘What’s happening this week, it looks like, is people are understanding this is about something more than just the vaccine mandate,’ he said during his show on Friday.
‘It’s becoming a big thing. It’s happening all over the world now. They’re thinking it might happen here in Washington on Super Bowl Sunday.’
Maher also bought up the ‘elitist’ culture – those who are ‘staying home in their Lululemon’s’ and who can afford to ‘wait out for a free vacation and money from the government’ – and how they do not understand why ‘those who can’t’ are angry.
‘They’re pissed off – the people who can’t,’ Maher said.
Many more protesters are expected to show up in Ottawa this weekend, and several convoys from the U.S. are heading toward the Canadian border as the protest enters its 16th day.
It’s no longer about the vaccines. It’s about the corruption and the arrogance.
Maher also brought up later in the segment how the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans – or stimulus checks – largely went out to families ‘in the top 20 percent of the country,’ citing The New York Times.
Ramaswamy, who was a biotech CEO during the time of the George Floyd protests, said during that time, every ‘institutional leader’ was saying: ‘What we need to do is listen and open our hearts and minds.’
He continued: ‘I think those same institutional leaders would now do well to take a page from that playbook and listen to these truckers too. Actually listen to what they have to say.’
‘The system is so corrupt,’ Williamson agreed. ‘This is what people are angry at.
‘It’s not just the corporate elites,’ she said. ‘This corruption is so baked into the cake. Of course people are angry, people are enraged and they are legitimately enraged.’
Yes.
Plus, from a friend: “We went from 15 days to Flatten the Curve to 18 Wheels to Flatten the Regime.” Heh.
BEST SELLER: Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win. #CommissionEarned
RAYMOND LOEWY AND SAUL BASS LEFT THE BUILDING A LONG TIME AGO: Corporate Flat Art Proves Big Business Is Infatuated With Ugliness.
Consider one of big businesses’ oft ignored crimes against society; the soulless art frequently featured in their ads, often derisively referred to as corporate flat art, corporate Memphis, or even Big Tech Art. It’s everywhere, from The New York Times to Facebook to the popular dating app Hinge. It’s visible in The New Yorker, YouTube, the World Health Organization, the United Nations, and a litany of other organizations and companies.
When I queued up music and sat down to write this, I was bombarded with an ugly array of gangly armed flat people telling me that Google Fi is a “phone plan that can.” I’m even personally haunted by the specter of flat art whenever I enter my university’s gym.
This unsettling ubiquity has given rise to a subreddit that’s dubbed it “globohomo art,” an abbreviation of “global homogenization.” Commenters condemn it as a style “mostly used by large companies and sociopolitical organizations that push for a globalized and homogenized society devoid of social and cultural identity.” While its widespread use and sheer ugliness has opened it to criticism and mockery, it’s struck a chord not simply for what it looks like, but for what it represents.
Last year, in one of his weekly “Wednesday Review of Modern Thought” segments at the Bleat, James Lileks was succinct in describing this form of corporate art: “It’s every big editorial page / feature page / magazine illustration. I noted this style a while ago, and was instantly annoyed by it. It’s Colorforms Totalitarianism.”
STUDENT “DEMANDS” SHOULD BE GIVEN ALL THE RESPECT THEY DESERVE: George Washington U. student government demands termination of two professors.
I THOUGHT THE GENEVA CONVENTION PROHIBITED TORTURE? New Zealand plays Barry Manilow to repel parliament protesters.
Authorities in New Zealand have been playing Barry Manilow’s greatest hits in an attempt to dislodge protesters camped outside the parliament building.
Songs by the US singer are being played on a 15-minute loop, along with the Spanish dance tune, Macarena.
The demonstrators, who are angry at Covid-19 vaccine mandates, responded by playing songs such as Twisted Sister’s We’re Not Gonna Take It.
Advantage: Demonstrators!
TROUBLING THAT SHE WAS ONCE AN ASSISTANT SECRETARY IN HOMELAND SECURITY: CNN analyst walks back comments calling for violent breakup of Freedom Convoy. Not much of a walkback, really. “Earlier today, I tweeted something that has been used by others to suggest I was promoting vigilantism. I was not. People have the freedom to protest. Governments have the responsibility to protect public safety. That was what I intended to say.”
TAMARA KEEL: “The other weekend I read of a dystopian cyberpunk future full of powerful tech companies that were effectively states unto themselves, balkanizing nations facing crises of governmental legitimacy, wars carried out by mercenaries and contractors serving as cutouts to hide the origins of their paymasters, all set in a world menaced by global plague. I also reread Robert Heinlein’s 1982 novel Friday.”
An underrated work. I agreee that it basically invented cyberpunk. I don’t think it got the attention it deserved because it came after the justly-panned Number of the Beast, written while Heinlein had a clogged carotid artery and had a brain that was basically oxygen starved. Post surgery he wrote Friday, which is much better. And yeah, it fits the present better than I’d like, except that we don’t have suborbital flights and beanstalks.
ROGER KIMBALL: The Oligarchy’s Response to the Freedom Convoy Bodes Ill for Them.
As I write, Canadian police, many dressed in military garb and supported by armored vehicles and snipers(!), are moving in to enforce several court orders and demands of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, and others that the “Freedom Convoy” of Canadian truckers stop blocking the Ambassador Bridge, the major artery between the United States and Canada, and disperse. Some of the protestors are leaving while many others are standing their ground.
Will the heavy hand of the state succeed in crushing the protest? In the short term, perhaps.
On Friday, Fox News host Tucker Carlson presented a montage of Canadian and American officials berating the truckers and threatening all sorts of dire retribution should they fail to obey their masters. Carlson was right: the hysterical squeaking of Justin Trudeau, U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and the other political mannequins was pathetic—a sign of impotence, not strength.
But impotence comes in long-term and short-term varieties. Long-term, I think Carlson is right. Officialdom’s response to the Freedom Convey is a desperate effort to put the genie of liberty back in the bottle. Ultimately, it will not work. But on the way to that failure there will be plenty of opportunities for the coercive power of the state to manifest itself.
A rat is most dangerous when it’s cornered, a state most dangerous when it’s failing. Plus:
For another thing, the trucker protest has been conspicuous for its pacific nature. Unlike the riots that raged across the United States in the aftermath of the death of career criminal George Floyd, no police stations were torched, no property was destroyed, no one was killed or maimed. And yet the truckers get the armored vehicles, the SWAT teams, the snipers.
Who rules? The hissing sound you hear is the sound of political legitimacy escaping from the institutions that, bloated with too much power and too little accountability, are beginning to deflate in the face of widespread popular unrest. At this point, it is not clear what will happen to the truckers in Ottawa.
Perhaps the regime will manage to disband this upsurge of discontent. But if so, the discontent itself will not dissipate. It will fester and spread. Preposterous beta males like Justin Trudeau are happy to bluster and threaten. For now the military and security services (most of them) remain loyal. I recommend Fidel fils read up on the fate of the Ceaușescus. The deposition of Canada’s prime minister is unlikely to be so sanguinary, granted. But I suspect it will be no less definitive.
When everyone from Matt Taibbi to Roger Kimball is making the Ceausescu comparison, maybe it’s time to rethink?
Of course, the Trudeau-rethinking will probably go like this:
BRIAN FLORES’ LAWSUIT EXPOSES THE ABSURDITY OF NFL RACIAL QUOTAS LIKE THE ‘ROONEY RULE:’
Part of the reason this wisdom hasn’t been applied to the coaching world is due to absurd racial quota systems like the “Rooney Rule” in the NFL, which forces teams to interview at least one black candidate for any major coaching or executive vacancy.
The absurdity of this practice can be illustrated by simply applying it to NFL roster vacancies. Imagine if every NFL team were forced to invite a white cornerback into training camp every season. No NFL team has started a white cornerback since Jason Sehorn in 2002. A white cornerback who fulfilled a team’s obligation under a “Sehorn Rule” would feel insecure and teammates would feel resentful, even if the player was qualified for the position and seriously considered for the job.
This is not a defense of the NFL. The league brought this upon themselves when they jumped in bed with the social justice radicals after the Kaepernick saga and doubled down after the George Floyd/BLM riots. They deserve this lawsuit and everything that’s coming to them.
The rest of America would do well to abandon the obsession with racial optics and skin-deep assessments of our fellow countrymen, or we’re heading toward the all-out racial conflict that the radical left seems obsessed with fomenting.
By former New England Patriot Jake Bequette, Read the whole thing.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: White House Report Card: A bad one and many more coming.
This week’s White House Report Card finds President Joe Biden sitting at the low point of his term — and likely going lower.
His polling average has fallen below 40% for the first time, his national security team is warning of a swift Russian invasion of Ukraine despite their best efforts, inflation is at a 40-year high, and Democrats are abandoning ship on his mask mandates.
As bad, he doesn’t appear to be doing anything to reverse course. . . .
“Not a good week,” said our Democratic grader, pollster John Zogby, who graded Biden’s week a C-. Conservative grader Jed Babbin, who gave it a D+, said that “incompetence” rules the White House.
At best.
Plus: “And a footnote to the week: The list of Republicans now calling on Biden to take a cognitive test has reached 37.”
The way things are going at this point , they should be asking Ron Klain to do the same.
JOHN NOLTE: In This Fight, Justin Trudeau Is George Wallace.
Trudeau is the villain fighting an unjust cause.
Trudeau is the fascist willing to destroy innocent people’s livelihoods to enforce immoral laws.
Trudeau is the gangster ready to commit violence rather than admit he is wrong.
If you want to know why Trudeau has been forced into hiding and why he serially melts down into a puddle of fecklessness in public, it’s because he is wrong. It’s that simple. He has no moral ground to stand on, which is why he’s attempted to manufacture it with lies about “racists” and “swastikas.” But in this ongoing civil rights standoff, everyone knows the bottom-line question is this…
How far is Trudeau willing to go to enforce a mandate for a vaccine that doesn’t even stop the spread of the coronavirus? How much violence is he willing to commit? How many livelihoods is he willing to annihilate for a vaccine that doesn’t even stop you from catching the virus?
Not that the success of the vaccine matters. Even if the vaccine did eradicate the virus, his stance would be just as immoral, but now that we know the vaccine does not stop the transmission, his stand looks especially foolish.
Like George Wallace and his fellow Democrat Bull Connor and all the Democrats who created and enforced Jim Crow, Trudeau is a bully checkmated by his own immoral choices.
Related: Freelance Journalist Did the One Thing the Liberal Media Has Failed to Do Regarding Canada’s Freedom Truckers. “If the elites ventured out and spoke with these people, it would take all of 10 minutes to see that this is a peaceful protest—and maybe there are points aplenty about how Canada’s COVID policy is a disaster. The same goes for the United States. The folks telling these people’s stories can be found on Substack. Rupa Subramanya, a freelance writer, had a lengthy post about the freedom truckers. She spoke to some 100 truckers, maybe more, and found that a) they’re not Nazis, b) they have legitimate reasons to be against the vaccination policy, and c) they’re not going anywhere.”